Reading Note:
Finding Fault
13 July 2015
Which way is up?
Over the weekend, which I devoted just about exclusively to reading William Maxwell (or reading about him), I discovered an essay from The New York Review of Books that I missed when it appeared, in 2010. Edward Mendelson writes à propos of the Library of America publication, in two volumes, of the bulk of Maxwell’s fiction — the very books that I have been leafing through. Less than attentive, I confused Mendelson with Daniel Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn is a classicist who writes about popular entertainment as well, and I was piqued to find that he was taking a look at Maxwell, who wouldn’t seem to fit beneath any of his rubrics (a third being the problem of the gay artist). Except he wasn’t: it was Edward Mendelson, without the second ‘s’ but also without the ‘h,’ who was going after Maxwell.
The NYRB essay, entitled “The Perils of His Magic Circle,” provides an occasion for Mendelson to discredit literature that refuses to take moral stands. Maxwell is made out to be something other than the “saintly” mentor who glows forth from every page of what can only be called a tribute album, A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations, edited by Charles Baxter, Michael Collier, and Edward Hirsch. Here, Maxwell is a magus, a high priest of “low church” modernism whose highly autobiographical fiction paints an unflattering self-portrait, but whose friends were too charmed by his manner to realize that he was exploiting them. Mendelson quotes a passage from the story, “Over By the River,” which I was going to write about anyway. Maxwell’s stand-in, George Carrington, looks at himself in the mirror while shaving.
There was a fatal flaw in his character: Nobody was ever as real to him as he was to himself. If people knew how little he cared whether they lived or died, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him.
To Mendelson, this is the self-indictment of moral depravity. But I don’t read it that way at all. It is not a confession, a positive admission of social bankruptcy. It is a feeling, sentimentally unsentimental, that, Edward Mendelson aside, we all have, whenever we’re confronted with the absolutely isolated doom of our bodies. (That George should think this while shaving makes perfect sense to me: what could be more Sisyphean than beginning every day with a razor?) There is a part of us that couldn’t care more whether other people live or die if it wanted to, because it simply doesn’t see them. It doesn’t hear, feel, or smell them, either. It is lodged deep in the gut and it feeds on weariness. That’s not all there is to us, of course, but it’s there, always.
“Over By the River,” a story that it took Maxwell many years to write, or, rather, I should say, many years to arrange to his satisfaction, is a nosegay of vignettes. Some of the blossoms show off the two little Carrington girls, who are prone to nightmares (the younger one especially) and to everlasting colds. Their parents, Iris and George, are comically perplexed by parenthood: no one is as responsible for their daughters’ welfare as they are, but no one is less equipped to take care of them. There is always an expert — a doctor, a teacher, perhaps even Jimmy, the elevator man — who knows more about how to make the Carringtons’ world work than the Carringtons do themselves. You might say that they don’t even know how to be grown-ups. In one odd, almost misfit scene, George finds himself at a penthouse cocktail party, helplessly tossed between the tedious and the tantalizing possibilities of casual chit-chat.
The story’s setting is the Carrington’s Upper East Side apartment and the neighborhood in which it sits. The Carrington’s address is 1 Gracie Square, a few blocks from where I’m writing. Its immediate neighborhood, which stretches along the East River from Gracie Mansion, at 88th Street, to the Brearley School, at 83rd, comprises Carl Schurz Park, Finley Walk, and the East End Avenue remainder of the old Henderson Place. Regular readers will have seen many photographs of this neighborhood over the years. I can think of no piece of fiction more densely packed with details that are personally familiar to me.
And that’s what “Over By the River” is, a collection of details before which states of mind are fanned out. There is no plot. Maxwell’s disdain for plots is, for Mendelson, another sign of moral deficiency. He writes,
All of Maxwell’s novels have a story but no plot. A plot is the means by which fiction portrays the consequences of actions, but it is not like a pool table; one event never mechanically causes another. In a plot each event provokes other events by making it possible for them to happen—possible but not inevitable, because human beings are always free to choose their response to provocation. Maxwell succumbed to an error common among writers who, as he did, organize their work for the finest possible rhythms and textures: the error of thinking of plot as mechanical and therefore trivial. As he explained to John Updike: “Plot, shmot.”
And then, concentrating this point somewhat,
He was incapable of thinking about erotic and moral choices for the same reason he was contemptuous about plot: he cared about art and the past, not about choices that might shape the future.
William Maxwell was certainly a fatalist. We are brought into this world without being aware of it, and we are subjected to Hamlet’s slings and arrows. We grow up to have personalities that seem little less determined than our skeletal peculiarities. Stuff happens, much of it awful. And yet Mendelson overlooks, in this condemnation of Maxwell’s lack of vision, the very choice that he damns elsewhere: Maxwell’s pursuit of a literary career.
Maxwell’s friends make vague, veiled allusions to the emotional price his wife and daughters paid for his ascetic devotion to art.
Maxwell was always thinking about choices that might shape the future. They just weren’t Mendelson’s choices.
Which way is up? Reading Maxwell is always agreeable: the man writes very well, and his judgment is sound. But where is he taking me? Through the pages of his little hobby, yet another History of Logan County, Illinois? To the corner of an overfurnished room in which we listen, as in Proust, for the sound of a beloved mother’s voice, and the delicious rustle of her skirts? Into the mind of an affable young man in need of psychoanalysis? And what about this suggestion of Mendelson’s, that Maxwell was not really a good man?
And is it important to answer any of these questions?